Thursday, July 16, 2015

A Quality Writer Comes to DC

When
DC buys Blackhawk from Quality they take over publication
without a pause; Quality's final issue, 107, is cover-dated December,
1956. Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera become DC artists when they come
over with
the book. Also coming along is Robert Bernstein, the sole writer on the
final batch of Quality issues.

The writers already at DC assigned to the feature at this point include
Jack Miller and Dave Wood;
possibly Dick Wood too,
who had worked on it into 1955 at Quality. I'm
still working out the authorship of the individual non-Bernstein
stories.

It would seem that the only completed story art done at Quality that DC
received in the
deal is "The Mutiny of the Red Sailors" in 108; the
letterer is whoever worked on the title as of 107. "The Threat from the
Abyss" may have been passed along to DC as a script; it too is an
anti-Communist story of the sort that DC didn't much do on their own
(and it's the final story in which the Blackhawk song appears at the
end). My opinion is that Bernstein wrote most of the stories here
directly for DC; he's moved to Aquaman, Green Arrow, and Congo Bill by
the end of 1957.

Nick, years ago in APA-I someone asked me if any writers came over from Quality with Dillin and Cuidera. At that point I hadn't seen many of these early DC stories at all; I said I didn't think so. It's good to set the record straight!